Current technologies are affording more varied types of communication and

collaboration than has ever before been possible, and many disciplines are

beginning to exploit these technologies, with language teacher education (LTE)

being one such discipline. Several researchers have explored synchronous and

asynchronous online communication and their uses and benefits within different

pedagogical contexts. Adding to this field of work, this paper provides a corpusbased

analysis of virtual synchronous and asynchronous student teacher and peer

mentor interactions, highlighting the pertinent issues of interactivity and

reflection. Variation and similarities between both modes are considered and

compared against larger spoken and written corpora to investigate if either mode

appears more akin to the spoken or written media. The paper closes with a

discussion of the pedagogical implications of such research findings for the teacher

education arena.